


Stain the Morning Sun

by BabylonsFall



Series: What Would Be [2]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Alec Hardison-centric, Alternate Universe - The Old Guard (Movie 2020) Fusion, Character Study, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Light Angst, Pre-Canon, briefly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:00:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26893318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabylonsFall/pseuds/BabylonsFall
Summary: Hardison and Parker become immortal. And then they receive a journal. It gives them far more questions than answers.
Relationships: Alec Hardison & Parker, Alec Hardison & Parker & Eliot Spencer
Series: What Would Be [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1962088
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35





	Stain the Morning Sun

**Author's Note:**

> So! A bit ago when I was asking for prompts, [mcghosts](https://mcghosts.tumblr.com/) asked for a continuation of my old guard leverage verse, and this is the result! (And, honestly, this makes little to no sense without What Would Be, so I'd suggest reading that first!)
> 
> Title is from Oh Darlin' What Have I Done by the White Buffalo
> 
> Hope y'all like it!

It takes...weeks. Months. To translate most of the journal. When the days are bright, and the nights long, Hardison finds it fun. It’s a new challenge - and one he can hold, can turn over in his hands and pick apart. So, it’s already a step up on the whole _not dying_ thing he’s got going on.

He finds experts. Pores through decades old dictionaries and forgotten dissertations. He can’t quite wrap his head around the actual language, but he can pick out words, here and there, phrases, as more time passes.

He’s had to have Parker steal the journal back five times from overenthusiastic professors before he starts just giving out copies. It gets him less data, and more people calling him a liar and a fake, but it also means less damage to the journal itself.

Parker...Parker’s interested in the journal, sure. Flits around him while he’s working on it. Asks questions occasionally when he makes some excited chirp or annoyed grumble - often enough, he doesn’t even realize he’s made a sound at all until she’s popping up at his side asking what he’s found.

But it’s not the same. Not for her.

She’s...not _better_ at this, than him. But she hides it better.

She takes bigger risks in her jobs. Comes back more full of energy than Hardison thought one person could hold.

She doesn’t ask what he doesn’t offer, and she just.

Lives.

And if both of them are pretending the journal ends one page earlier. Well.

Like he said, she hides it better.

Hardison wouldn’t even call it pretending. As far as he’s concerned, that page does not exist. If he wasn’t sure they’d wreck the binding tearing the damn thing out, he’d toss that singular page into the fire.

Just thinking about it puts the taste of copper and lead in his mouth.

And, frankly, there’s only so much orange soda a man can drink to wash the taste out.

_(No, no, Alec! Look at me! Look at me! You’re going to be fine - you’re going to be- you’re going to be okay! Somebody call 91-_ Nope. No. Nu-uh. He had enough nights waking up screaming, ash on his tongue and no sound coming out, a pain in his chest flaring bright and hot and the memory of bright light searing into his brain, even as all he can hear is his Nana screaming. He had enough nights. Enough mornings. Enough days. Without the added memory, thank you very much.)

What really pisses him off though - what really sets his teeth on edge?

He’s not even fucking mad.

But he should be.

He should be so fucked off about being left _alone_. He should want to tear the journal apart, piece by piece, just for that last page, just for that weak attempt at an apology.

He _should._

But he isn’t.

And, because emotions are a goddamn mess on the best of days in the best of people, _that’s_ what pisses him off.

Because, as much as he can, he _gets it_.

Oh, sure, he didn’t at first. At first, when he’d found the journal full of chicken scratch over a hundred years old written in a language far older than even that, with one page in the back picked out in carefully precise english, he’d read through it with so much excitement, he’d given himself whiplash when he’d actually _read_ the page.

_I’m sorry I can’t be there._

The rest of the page talked of others - a small group, together for a century. Another, closer to home, that this stranger collided with and ran away from.

Nowhere in there did it say why they were separate. What made them - either this stranger and his friend, or hell, him and Parker - different, if they were all in this together.

So, yeah, when Hardison first read it, he’d been pissed.

And he’d been scared.

And then he’d started translating.

They weren’t perfect translations - not by a long shot. Not quite google translate levels of bad but… close. Very close.

But they spoke of everything. And absolutely nothing.

Daily observations. A passing memory. Stories shared between two kindred spirits.

He can’t get the depth, but he can scratch the surface. And what he’s seeing is a pair of lonely people, passing by each other in a dwindling orbit, but never quite colliding. One managed to find a family in that loneliness, as far as he could tell. It took halfway through the damn journal for him to get names for the faces in his dreams - but that moment he connected them? Connected Nicky and Joe and Booker and Andy with the flits of memories he only barely got to see…

Parker’s eyes, her smile, when he shared that finding with her would stay with him for the rest of his days, he was sure.

The last page had been signed with an ‘E’. Simple as anything, and all the more annoying for it. Hardison doesn’t get the name ‘Eliot,’ or ‘Sophie,’ until he’s almost done with the journal.

And by that point...he’s not mad anymore.

He doesn’t have the years, yet (and _that_ is still terrifying to think of, so no thank you), to understand the loneliness that prompted the secrecy and the avoidance. Not by a long shot.

But he has a hollow in his chest, some nights, remembering those years before Nana. Those months before Parker.

There’s a… comfort, in knowing yourself. In knowing who you can count on and limiting it to yourself.

Parker gets it, probably better than he does, in her own way.

So. Yeah. Hardison gets it.

The page’s words sink like fire in his bones - pain flaring from his sternum uncomfortably hot and bright, and he knows he should be mad.

It takes months to admit he never was.

* * *

“You think we’d fit in with them?” He asks, softly, into the dark. The apartment he’s got right now is large. Spacious. And empty. The windows overlooking the city stretch from floor to ceiling, and, at this height, the cars are just twinkling lights, zipping by and creating fluorescent memories across the asphalt. If he squints his eyes just right, they bleed into the stars above.

“...Maybe.” Parker says, from somewhere above him. It’s soft enough that Hardison knows she’s still thinking on it. Stays quiet to give her time. “Maybe not. Does it matter?”

And the question’s genuine, sinking into the quiet between them with a weight that makes Hardison’s shoulders sag. “No, I guess it doesn’t.” They had their family. And, who knows, maybe a new one would come along and fit right in that empty space that even Hardison could see, thousands of miles away.

But it wasn’t them. They were where they were for a reason, and it wasn’t with Andy and them.

And, as he watches the lights twisting and dancing so far below, he could admit, to himself and Parker, that that was okay.

* * *

“We could try to find them?”

“Who?” And Hardison doesn’t even need to look over to know Parker’s glaring at him. Groaning, he pushes himself away from his computer, meeting her glare head on. “Okay, why?”

“Why not?”

“Because he doesn’t want to be found. And, apparently, neither does Sophie.” After all, it’s been months, and the journal was still their only point of actual contact.

They still had the dreams, of course. Flashes of a tired face and a worn out body, brief glimpses of bright eyes and sharp smiles. But nothing...nothing to hold onto. Nothing to give shape to the names they had.

And, most days, that fact still hurt. But, after the initial fervor had died down, after him and Parker had settled into...into whatever it was they were doing, he could admit that the sting was muted now.

She doesn’t even bother replying out loud.

“All we have are names they likely made up about a century ago.”

A quirk of her eyebrow.

“First names, at that by the way. Not even a fake last name. I can track an alias. I can not track a first name pulled out of nowhere.”

Rolled eyes.

“...Alright, alright, I already looked. Nada. Zip. Zilch.” Hardison admits, throwing up his hands and turning back to the computer. He wanted to find them as much as Parker did. To at least get...he didn’t even know. Not closure, that’s for damn sure. But _something_.

Something he could touch, and turn over, and _work with_. But they were impossible.

“You checked into Dubeniwhatever’s offer?” He asks, in some vague hope it’ll throw her off the trail for a little while. The snort he hears tells him he failed miserably, but, thankfully, she seems to take pity on him.

“Looks easy enough. He said he’s bringing in two others - a roper and a hitter, but that’s normal.” Normal, easy, clean.

Hardison could work with that. “Friday, right?”

When he doesn’t get a reply, he glances over. An open window is all that greets him back, and all he can do is smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
